Can I ssh somewhere, run some commands, and then leave myself a prompt?

Question

I find myself needing to log into various servers, set environment variables, and then work interactively.

e.g.

$ ssh anvil
jla@anvil$ export V=hello         


        

Answer 1

It is worth to note that ssh -t can actually be used to connect to one host via another host.

So for example if you want to execute a command on anvil, but anvil is only accessible from host gateway (by firewall etc.), you can do like this:

ssh gateway -t 'ssh anvil -t "export V=hello; export W=world;bash -l";'

Exiting the anvil, will also log you out of gateway (if you want to stay on gatway after leaving anvil than just add another bash -l before closing the command.

Answer 2

You could also use the following expect script:

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
spawn ssh $argv
send "export V=hello\n"
send "export W=world\n"
send "echo \$V \$W\n"
interact

Answer 3

Turns out this is answered by this question:

How can I ssh directly to a particular directory?

to ssh:

ssh -t anvil "export V=hello; export W=world; bash"

followed by:

jla@anvil$ echo $V $W
hello world

Answer 4

Another approach is to execute this beast (also gives me a colored shell):

ssh host -t "echo 'rm /tmp/initfile; source ~/.bashrc; cd foo/; git status' > /tmp/initfile; bash --init-file /tmp/initfile"

Answer 5

Probably the simplest thing is:

$ ssh -t host 'cmd1; cmd2; sh -i'

If you want to set variables, do:

$ ssh -t host 'cmd1; cmd2; FOO=hello sh -i'

Note that this is a terrible hack, and you would be much better off putting your desired initial commands in a script and doing:

$ scp setup host:~
$ ssh host
host$ . setup